Anniversaries can be elusive things when you’re talking about a small theater company.

Minneapolis Musical Theatre, for instance, is touting this weekend’s opening of “The Great American Trailer Park Musical” as the kickoff of its “Great Big Surprising 10th Anniversary Season.”

As co-founder Kevin Hansen explains it, 2000 was the year when the company got its nonprofit status and began staging a regular season of three musicals annually.

Fair enough. But Hansen and MMT artistic director Steven Meerdink have been working together on the local theater scene for almost a decade longer than that. Their company began as a touring ensemble that played college campuses and summer-stock theaters with musical revues and populist crowd-pleasers like “Godspell” and “Forever Plaid.”

Today, MMT has made a name for itself as a company that brings unknown, underappreciated or offbeat titles of American musical theater to the Twin Cities. A glance at the new season shows off a diversity that is a product of Meerdink and his collaborators constantly beating the bushes of regional and off-Broadway fare.

“Trailer Park,” for instance, was the darling of the New York Musical Theatre Festival five years ago and played off-Broadway in autumn 2005. It occupies the annual “quirky” slot in the MMT lineup, the kind of show that can get you in the door with just its title. Examples of such titles from MMT seasons past include “Zombie Prom,” “Jerry Springer: The Opera” and “Bat Boy: The Musical.”

Described by one New York critic as “South Park” meets “Desperate Housewives,” “The Great American Trailer Park Musical” is set at Armadillo Acres, Florida’s most exclusive mobile home community. The dramatis personae include a stripper on the run, an agoraphobic housewife, her tollbooth-collector husband and a trashy Greek chorus. The songs have titles like “This Side of the Tracks,” “Flushed Down the Pipes” and “Road Kill.”

The rest of the MMT season is, relatively speaking, tame: The company’s spring offering of “Big River: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” is the sort of show Hansen and Meerdink hope will draw family audiences, as last year’s production of “The Secret Garden” was designed to do. “Mame,” which closes out the season, hasn’t received a major staging in the Twin Cities in at least a decade and reflects the company’s affection for old standbys. That affection doesn’t equate with afraid-to-mess-with-it reverence, though: In a cross-dressing turn, Hansen will play the title character.

Not all of those titles are going to appeal to the same kind of audience, and that’s intentional.

“One of the things that most surprises people about us is the diversity of our audiences,” said Hansen. “There’s this perception that we play to young, urban people, and that’s not at all the case. Our audiences come from 200 different ZIP codes. And the idea is that once these people have had exposure to one kind of show, they’ll come for others.”

Operating on a shoestring budget of about $140,000 a year, MMT provides theatrical experiences that at once nudge you out of your comfort zone while making you feel like part of an extended — if offbeat — family. At the end of every performance, the company pulls the name of an audience member out of a hat and presents him/her with a cast recording of the show.

Despite sharing a common surname, Emily Brooke Hansen is no relation to the company’s co-founder, but she said she feels a sense of community working at MMT.

“Working at Minneapolis Musical Theatre makes me feel like I have a safe space to go back to,” said Hansen, who has appeared in eight shows at MMT since making her debut in the 2005 production of “Applause.” “The people they hire have integrity, and Steven and Kevin are friendly and honest. If something’s not working, they’ll tell you it’s not working, and then they’ll help you find a way to make it work.”

Emily Hansen likes some of the riskier choices the theater has made, which have pushed her comfort zone as a performer. She was barely dressed during parts of “Bright Lights, Big City,” got to play a drag queen in “La Cage Aux Folles” and had a chance to sing obscenities at the top of her lungs during “Jerry Springer: The Opera.”

Because MMT uses non-Equity actors almost exclusively, the theater has a blend of experienced artists and performers at the beginning of their careers. Some of those performers go on to other stages in the Twin Cities and beyond: Mitchell Jarvis, one of the stars of the Broadway hit “Rock of Ages,” played Tobias in MMT’s 1998 production of “Sweeney Todd.”

Keeping a small theater company alive is never an easy proposition; even less so in difficult economic times. For the founders of Minneapolis Musical Theatre, it’s a labor of love. Still, Meerdink conceded, “It’s always a challenge. Given this economy, the struggle is to find and do work that will keep the mission statement alive and put butts in the seats.”

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